Monday, June 25, 2012

The easy suggestion here
is to tell you to brew what you like to drink.
Unfortunately, this will come with a lot of caveats, and you might have
some misunderstandings about what beer you even like.

The craft beer industry
has done a lot to really help people understand a lot more about different
types of beer, but this post is going to give you a little information to help
you decide what you want to brew your first time out.

Lagers, ales and California Commons, oh my!

Because beer has been
around for so long, a lot of the terms like “beer” and “ale” have actually
changed a lot since the terms first came into usage. I’m not going to go into the historic
definitions of these terms now, but I will give you a bit of a primer in what
they mean today.

The first myth I want to
dispel is that ales are bitter, or lagers are watery and flavorless. The differences between ales and lagers,
while they do make quite a bit of difference in the end flavor of the beer,
have little to do with how bitter or strong tasting a beer is.

Ale

Ales are brewed with ale
yeast, a top-fermenting yeast. What does
that mean? Top-fermenting yeast tends to
sit at the top of the beer while it’s fermenting. You get a thick, white/tan foam floating on
top of your beer called krausen (you do get krausen with lager yeast as well,
but it’s typically a lot smaller.) Ale
yeasts are typically fermented at higher temperatures (60-75ºf) and can add
slight fruity or spicy flavors to the beer.
Most craft beers are ales.
They’re typically easier to make, and tend to have more complex flavors
than lagers.

Lager

Lager literally means
“storage” in german. Lager is brewed
with lager yeast, a bottom fermenting yeast.
While ale yeast eventually drops to the bottom after it’s consumed all
the sugars it can, lager yeast typically falls to the bottom very quickly, and
is referred to as a bottom-fermenting yeast.
When brewing with lager yeast, you end up with a much smaller krausen. You typically ferment lagers at lower
temperatures (45-55ºf), and then “lager” (bring the temperature of the beer
slowly down to roughly 35ºf and then keep it at that temperature for several
weeks) the beer once fermentation is done.
Budweiser is a very widely distributed example of a lager, but not all
lagers are pale, lightly flavored beers.
Lagers span the entire spectrum from extremely light to extremely
dark. Lagers are more difficult to make,
and have a “cleaner” flavor. By that, I
mean you won’t get many of the fruity or spicy characteristics that you
typically get with ale yeasts.

California Common

There is one more type
of beer that doesn’t really fall into either of those two categories (well,
sours don’t really fit into either of the other two categories either, but that
falls outside of what you’d likely want to make for your first beer.) The California common is a beer that is
fermented using lager yeast, but at ale fermentation temperatures, and not
lagered. One of the most well know
examples of a California Common is Anchor Steam Beer. Typically, these beers are a bit cleaner
tasting than ales, but a bit more complex than lagers. They’re also considerably easier to brew than
a normal lager.

That’s great, but how do I decide what to brew
for my first batch?

My suggestion is to make
an ale or California Common for your first batch. You will have a lot of new things to keep
track of your first time brewing, you’re probably best off not adding the
complication of making it a lager.

The main source of sugar
in beer is malt, grains. You can either
extract the maltose (grain sugar) yourself by soaking the grains at a specific temperature
for a period of time, or you can buy malt extract where someone has already done the work of extracting the maltose from the grain for you.

Stick to extract with
specialty grains (grains that add additional flavor to the beer) for your first
beer. Using malt extract instead of
doing an all-grain batch eliminates a lot of work. While you might eventually want to go
all-grain, the first time you make beer is already going to be a lot of work,
and you don’t want to end up doing so much that you end up discouraged an
unwilling to do it again.

I’m also going to
suggest buying a recipe kit for your first batch. Formulating a good beer recipe is actually
fairly difficult, and even following someone else’s recipe can be difficult
your first time. Kits eliminate a lot of
the guess work, all of the ingredients are already measured out and packaged in
a way that makes them easy to use. Check
to see if your kit has any specialty grains, and if they do, ask to have them
crushed by the people you’re buying it from.
Crushing the grains helps you get more flavor out of them, and it can be
difficult to do it properly at home.

As for what to make
beyond that, make what you like. If you
like lighter beers, make a lighter beer.
If you like darker beers, make a dark beer. Very, very light beers can be hard to get
right because any off-flavor will stand out like a sore thumb.

Ambers and reds are actually a good place to start. They're not super light, so off flavors won’t be
too apparent, but they're also not so strongly flavored that you would be unable
to tell if you really made a big mistake during the brew process. The hop flavors (hops are used for bittering,
flavor and aroma, and range from earthy, to piney, to flowery, to citrusy) also tend to be fairly subdued, so you shouldn’t have trouble finding people willing to
drink your beer (although, if you like really hoppy beer, make a really hoppy beer.)

Monday, June 18, 2012

For this post, I’m going to be linking to various
products to show you examples of the equipment you should purchase to
brew your first batch of beer. While
purchasing the products online is just fine, I encourage you to see if there is a
homebrew store in your area and visit the store in person. Not all local homebrew stores are great, but
a lot of them are, and the people working there tend to be very helpful.

Brewing beer can be done
extremely inexpensively. That being
said, ultimately, brewing your own beer shouldn’t be about getting cheap beer, it should be about brewing a good beer, and having fun doing it.

When I started brewing,
I was out of work. I had been interested
in brewing beer for a while, but hadn’t made the leap to actually doing
it. As much fun as it is to search for
job openings, send out resumes, call prospective employers, I needed something
else to help occupy some of my time.
Unfortunately, being out of work, I was on a bit of a tighter budget, so
a lot of hobbies were out of the question.
Brewing, on the other hand, was inexpensive, and can be as little or as
much time-consuming as you really want it to be.

I made my first batch of
beer for roughly $35, and that included equipment that would be reusable
through a number of brews. Admittedly, I
did luck out a bit. My grandfather had
been a homebrewer, so I got a carboy (a big, glass bottle) as well as some other equipment from him, and my dad
had an old turkey fryer he had sworn off using, but had kept immaculately clean
on the inside (the outside of the pot was a different story, but that’s far
less important.) That left me with
buying a cheap ingredient kit for $20 and another $15 worth of equipment to
buy.

What do you need?

When it comes down to
it, there are really only two pieces of equipment you need in order to brew your
first batch of beer (one, if you really want to dumb down the process.)

Brew Pot

The first thing you need
is a pot to boil the wort (unfermented beer, pronounced wûrt.) Ideally, you want to be able to do a full
boil, boiling all of the water for the beer, which, for a 5 gallon (20qt.)
batch, you’d likely want at least a 7 gallon pot. Most people don’t have a 7 gallon pot on
hand, and even if they do, boiling 5+ gallons of water on your stove can be
extremely difficult, so you can do what is called a partial boil, boiling a
smaller volume of wort and then topping off with additional water when you
transfer it to the fermenter (see below).
To do a partial boil, you should make at least 2 gallons of wort, so
you’ll want roughly a 3 gallon pot.

Possibly the best route
to go for a brew pot is to get one of these: Brinkmann 815-4001-S Turkey Fryer. The pot is big enough to do a full boil, and
it comes with a propane burner, so you don’t have to try to boil 5+ gallons of
liquid on your stove. You can also find
turkey fryers on craigslist fairly frequently, especially after Thanksgiving in
the US, but make sure the inside of the pot is spotless if it’s used. You don’t want any old, cooked on grease in
the pot as it’ll ruin the beer.

Now, I did mention being
able to skip one piece of equipment if you’re really trying to do this in a
minimalistic fashion. There does exist
no-boil beer kits like this one: Coopers Brewmaster Selection India Pale Ale No Boil Home Brew Beer Kit. If you use one of these, you wouldn’t need to
have a pot to boil the wort in. That
being said, I’ve never tried one of these myself, and I’ve never heard of
anyone being terribly impressed with the end result.

Fermenter

The second thing you’ll
need is something to actually ferment the beer in. You have a couple of choices here. I personally use a glass carboy, like this
one: 6.5 Gallon glass carboy. You can also use a plastic bucket like this
one: 6.5 Gallon plastic fermenter with lid. They also make a plastic bottle similar to
the glass carboy: 6 Gallon Better Bottle. There are some pros and cons to any of those
choices, and I might go into those pros and cons in another post, but for the
most part, they work the same. You put
your wort into the fermenter, add yeast, wait a few days and the yeast will have
converted the sugar into alcohol and you’ll have beer. I do suggest that no matter what you use for
a fermenter, it should be at least 6 to 6.5 gallons in size for a 5 gallon
batch. While the wort is fermenting,
you’ll likely get a lot of foam on top (for ales anyway), and if the fermenter is
too small, it will spray out the top of the fermenter.

So, those are the two
things you absolutely need. Lets go over
a few things that you really should have for your first batch of beer, but aren't absolutely necessary.

Airlock

You’ll need an airlock
like this one: 3 Piece Plastic Airlock (Sold in sets of 3). If you get a carboy or a better bottle,
you’ll also need an appropriately sized rubber stopper with a hole drilled
through it, like this: Drilled Rubber Stopper (Carboy Bung Sets of 3). If you’re using something like the bucket
listed above, it should already have a hole drilled in the lid with a rubber
grommet for the airlock to go into. The
airlock allows the gasses created by the fermenting beer to get out, while
stopping air and other things from getting in.

Sanitizer

You’ll want a
sanitizer. While regular soap can clean
your equipment well, sanitizer kills all bacteria, mold and fungus that might
compete with your yeast for the tasty sugars in the unfermented wort. Even if you don’t see anything on your
equipment, there are still microscopic organisms that will feast on the sugar,
and even the alcohol the yeast converts the sugars into. The sanitizer will kill all of unwanted
organisms, so the yeast can do its job without any interference.

You can use a mild
bleach solution for this, but you would then want to rinse out the bleach with
sterilized water as the bleach will create off-flavors in the
beer, and bleach isn’t terribly good for you to ingest. I personally like to use Star San, but I
also use Iodophor. Both Star San and iodophor are no-rinse
sanitizers. You rinse your equipment in
the sanitizer, pour it our and then you can immediately introduce the equipment
to the wort or beer without rinsing off the equipment.

Iodophor is basically
iodine, and can stain your equipment, your counter tops, your hands (if used
improperly) but Star San is extremely slipperly, and foams up a lot. Some people don’t like how much Star San foam
remains in their fermenter after pouring out the sanitizer. They fear it will somehow create off flavors
in the beer. I’ve never had any issues
with Star San, and as Star San advocates like to say, “don’t fear the foam”. The leftover star san will actually break
down into nutrients for the yeast.

Bottling Bucket

You’ll want some way to
get the beer into bottles. A bottling
bucket is a great way to do that: Bottling Bucket with Spigot. Some people do use a fermenter with a spigot
and bottle directly from the fermenter.
If you’re using a glass carboy or a fermenter without a spigot, you’ll
want a bottling bucket.

Bottling Wand

Along with the bottling
bucket, the bottling wand (Spring Loaded Beer Bottle Filler) is a
great way to get the beer into bottles that minimizes spillage and keeps you
from introducing too much oxygen into the beer.
You’ll also want a short piece of vinyl hose to connect the bottling
wand to the spigot on the bottling bucket.

Racking Cane

If your fermenter isn’t
also your bottling bucket, you’ll need a way to transfer the beer from the
fermenter to the bottling bucket.
Typically, this is done with a racking cane (Racking Cane - 3/8 inch x 24 inches long). You’ll also need a few feet of vinyl hose (5
feet should be plenty). Make sure you
get a nice tight fit between the racking cane and the vinyl hose or you’ll end
up leaking beer or introducing oxygen to the beer.

Even better than a plain
racking can is an autosiphon (Auto-Siphon - 3/8"). The autosiphon starts transferring the wort
to the bottling bucket without you needing to manually sucking or blowing the
beer through the hose. When I first
started brewing, the autosiphon was significantly more than a racking cane, but
the price has come down a lot.

Hydrometer

The hydrometer (Hydrometer - Triple Scale) is one
of the most important, yet most overlooked pieces of equipment for homebrewing
beer. The hydrometer allows you to
measure how much dissolved sugar there is in your wort before it’s fermented
into beer, and more importantly, will tell you when your beer is finished
fermenting. A lot of beginners overlook
the hydrometer because they figure they don’t need to know how much dissolved
sugar is in the wort or they don’t care about calculating how much alcohol is
in the beer, but the really important part is being able to tell when the beer
is done fermenting. Bottling your beer
before it’s done fermenting can lead to exploding bottles.

Thermometer

Far less important than
the hydrometer, but still good to have is a thermometer (Dial Thermometer). Go for one that will show you at least 30ºf
at the low end and 220ºf at the high end.
Digital thermometers are great as long as they’re accurate.

Bottles

When your beer is done
fermenting, you’ll want some way to store the beer. Traditionally, this is done with bottles (24 12oz Amber long neck bottles). The bottles can really be any size, and can
even be plastic, but you want to stay away from clear or green bottles. Amber/brown bottles, or even black are your
best bet as they keep out UV light, which causes beer to go skunky. You know the odd, skunky flavor that imported
beer in green bottles has, that’s not caused by the brewing process, it’s
caused by UV light reacting with the beer and turning it skunky.

If you’re going with
12-oz bottles like the ones in the link, you’ll want around 50. Don’t get the screw-top glass bottles, the
type of capper you’re likely to get won’t apply the cap properly, so the cap
will either leak, or the bottle will break.

And finally, if you’re
using glass bottles, you’ll need a special tool to apply the caps. Red Baron Bottle Capper. The linked bottle capper is known as a wing
capper. You can also get a bench capper
(Super Agata Bench Bottle Capper), which
is easier to operate, but tends to be a lot more expensive.

Buying a kit

If you’ve got the money
to do so, buying a kit like this: Home Brewing Equipment Kit with Carboy & Instructional Beer Making DVD, will
get you a lot of the way toward having everything you need. You may periodically find deals on group deal
sites like Groupon for homebrew kits, and you can check out craigslist for
people selling their old homebrew equipment.
If you do buy used equipment from craigslist, be careful with any
plastic/rubber equipment that it comes with as it’s possible for the plastic to
become “infected” with bad bacteria either through neglect, or intentionally
done (I don’t mean people are maliciously selling homebrew equipment that
they’ve intentially infected with bad bacteria.
There are some types of beer that call for using various wild yeasts
like brettanomyces, but then that equipment should only be used for beer
you intentionally want infected). It
won’t likely hurt you, but it can cause your beer to turn out bad.

If you do buy a whole
kit, go back through the list of things I’m recommending you buy to figure out
if there are any gaps you’ll need to fill in.

Next week’s post will be
far shorter. I’ll be talking about how
to pick your first recipe.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Ah, glorious beer. We have truly entered into a zymurgistic (area of science related to fermentation and brewing) renaissance.

The
craft beer has become extremely popular in the last few years. It
seems that new, small breweries and brew pubs pop up every couple of
months in my home state of Minnesota, and from what I’ve seen elsewhere,
this appears to be the case just about everywhere in the US. Even with
all these new sources of beer, it appears we have yet to hit the
saturation point. Every new brewery seems to open with great interest
and anticipation at what new and unique thing they will bring to the
brewing community. Of course, not every new brewery is successful, but
their chances of success are far greater than they would have been even
five years ago.

All of this new interest in craft beer has also
fostered a lot of interest in how beer is made, and has drawn in a large
crowd that is interested in brewing their own beer at home.

I,
myself, have been homebrewing beer for about four years now, and while
my interest in brewing beer waxes and wanes, it has been the one hobby
that has really taken hold for me. I am passionate about beer in
general, and brewing beer gives me a great creative outlet with so many
facets to the hobby that when I become bored with one aspect of the
hobby, another aspect easily garners my interest.

I’ve been
looking for a topic to write about for some time now, and have struggled
to find a topic until recently, when I realized, I really do have one
subject that I’m passionate about and love to talk about with anyone
that will listen. I just hadn’t thought of homebrewing as something to
write about because I spend so much time talking about it.

The
purpose of this website is to help spread the good word about
homebrewing, so to speak. I plan to give information on how to brew
beer at home, interspersed with information on what I’m doing now with
brewing beer.

I hope to make this blog a fairly regular thing for
me, so I hope I can interest you in brewing beer and get you to check
in often to get more information and evolve your brewing while I
continue to evolve with you.